Monday, April 8, 2013

Hubris Comes Before the Fall, or: Learning to Just Shut the Fuck Up Because You're Not That Smart

I'm not very original in that I think I'm an advice genius. I know what's wrong with everyone and I know how to fix it, if only they would listen. It's so obvious because I'm an objective observer, you know? They can't help it because they're too close to the problem. Poor fools. If only they could just back away enough to see that I'm just trying to help!

I AM, however, original in that I've gone to the lengths of putting a time stamp on advice that I think is particularly good and taking note of how long it takes my friends to come to the realization that I was right (no idea what happens when my advice was wrong, no surprise there either). I've concluded "it takes 3 years for anyone to realize that I was right all along", of course said with a tone of disdain for people's myopia and obdurateness. I usually follow this up with "Human nature, you know? Haha so sad", SUBTEXT: "I'm above this even though I too am demonstrably a human". This statement is the result of two different friends acting on points I said might be important 3 years prior. They eventually agreed with me, which should have been enough, but the fact that they did it in their own time, by their own means was somehow an affront to me. Like they didn't agree with me fast enough so it doesn't count. One of these was advice I gave a friend about her relationship (he's not right for you in the long-term because you have fundamentally different life goals), the other was about a job (you should work in a field that has to do with your major, your passions, or your strengths, because languishing around in sales is beneath your intellect).

Well, today I was thinking about my problems, feeling stupid because a lot of the root causes were so obvious in retrospect. I was thinking, "Why I didn't see everything coming sooner?" I went into my journal to read my thoughts at the beginning of the process, trying to make sense of it all, and realized that it's been 3 years since I didn't take the advice I gave myself in those pages, before everything got so complicated and confusing.

FFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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